Xamarin.Forms Feature Roadmap

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@DavidOrtinau it's now March, can we get a concrete update on the status of perf improvements for Android? I keep checking github and the nightly builds but I still haven't seen any checkins related to perf. Why is that?

@TonyD said:@DavidOrtinau it's now March, can we get a concrete update on the status of perf improvements for Android? I keep checking github and the nightly builds but I still haven't seen any checkins related to perf. Why is that?

It tends to be in different branches, they've just committed some android fast renderers code (for button, image and label views) which eliminates the ViewGroup container around views and implements IVisualElementRenderer directly, so hopefully for complex layouts should give a boost to general smoothness & reduced inflate time.

@TonyD said:@DavidOrtinau it's now March, can we get a concrete update on the status of perf improvements for Android? I keep checking github and the nightly builds but I still haven't seen any checkins related to perf. Why is that?

I'd like to know that too.

What is the concrete \ actual roadmap of the Xamarin Forms product?

Does the Xamarin Forms team has a concrete\clear roadmap? Can we, devs using Xamarin Forms, see it please?

This page is just a discussion page on the upcoming features, but what is the actual \ concrete roadmap which the team uses ? Or is it a secret?

From my point of view, Xamarin Forms development continues on same blurry line.. A lot of promises, teams remains small, nothing changes... I guess it is what it is..

Is this a native app?
How would you the performance rate?
Caught it in Profiler
No escape from a slow UI inflate.

Open your App
Lookup the code and see
There is a breakpoint, but it's not being hit
Because the Viewgroup can come, the Viewgroup won't go
Memory high, Quality low
Any way the build goes doesn't really matter to me. to me.

Xamarin just checked in code
Put the method in a thread
Didn't try catch now it's dead
Xamarin, the exception had just begun
But now you've gone and thrown it all again

Scrum master, oo oo oo oo ohhhh
Didn't mean to make you cry
If the schedule is not back on time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on, as if this project never really happened

Too late, the meeting has come
Sends shivers down my spine
Boss is yelling all the time
Come on everybody, we"ve got to go
Gotta checkin everything and face the review

Xamarin, oooo ooohhhh
I don't wanna debug
I sometimes wish I never started coding at all.

I see a little little monkey making code,
Xamarin! Xamarin!
Will you compile to Android?

Code reviews and APIs
Bosses will not be happy!

DE ICAZA! (de icaza)
DE ICAZA! (de icaza)
De Icaza Help me please!

RuimarihnOOOooooo...

I'm just a poor dev, nobody loves me
HE'S JUST A POOR DEV, FROM A POOR COMPANY,
SPARE HIM HIS CODE FROM CODE REVIEWS PLEASE!

Nugets come, nugets go,
Will you let me code?
BCLBuild! No, we will not let you code!
XamlC! No, we will not let you code!
InitializeComponent! No, we will not let you code
We'll not let you code
We'll not let you code
No, No, No, No
Xamarin, Xamarin, (Xamarin, let me code)

GitHub has a branch that is put aside for speed, for speed, for speeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed

So you think you can make it build in a short time?
So you think you can expect us to meet the deadliiine?
Oooooh, Ortinau, can't do this to me Ortinau,
Just gotta write songs, write silly lyrics about all this

@LGMaestrelli@Irreal I have a lot of respect for developers, so after all this inexplicably wasted time, I'm beginning to think the XF team is intentionally botching and delaying Android perf because Google is a competitor to Microsoft.

I think is safe to say that most of us, developers, are disappointed with XF

Dude if you are disappointed with XF go to XF's github and make it better! Its open source!

I've been working with XF since 1.3.0 and I must say things are getting better since then, a lot better, its a great technology, but also complex.

Some errors are not from XF, are from VS integration for example. Indeed I'd like to see components to be more polished but I know its just a matter of time for that to happen. Meanwhile, relax, try to sing the Xamarin Rhapsody and make your C# skills do the rest.

Our company is really looking for one stop shopping of FORMS on all the major platforms. It's great to see MacOS on the roadmap, unfortunately since over 70% of PC users are still on Windows 7. Supporting MacOS won't be enough for us to move whole hog!!! How soon until we see support of Forms on Windows7. Or is Forms going to stop at UWP?

@Irreal said:
I'm glad most people "got" it, but I do wish to clarify anyways that my intention was to have some light hearted fun at the expense of the state of Xamarin.Forms development.

I would never spend the time if I didn't actually love the framework and the community.
It is because I love it so, that I care and would like to see it become even better.

One of the problems is that we expected big resourced and hugely faster development with the Microsoft buyout and that just isn't there. At least not in a big enough way.

But we just have to deal with it and continue being a part of this awesome community.

It IS an awesome community! Your post got a lot of love in the office.

I feel for those who experience frustration and pain, and real business impact. For my part, I cannot afford to stop and dwell there. Instead, I'm working to get you unstuck and moving in a positive direction by all means at my disposal.

A lot of you are having amazing success with Forms. I hope everyone has a chance to see the Visual Studio 2017 keynote yesterday and the fantastic Xamarin.Forms work that is featured. For anyone that has concerns about investment in the platform, I think that speaks volumes.

Where we as a team and community can point to any best practices or guidance to avoid pitfalls, let's do that. And where we can influence improvements in performance, stability, and closing feature gaps let's continue doing that.

All along the way I'm trying to improve communication and transparency. We won't always agree. But we certainly do agree we have a fantastic community, one we owe ourselves to encourage to achieve very best.

Total bugs are down. New bugs are getting swifter first look and responses. We are eating into the backlog of issues. Communication is up on Bugzilla, to make it more clear what we have reviewed and reporting on status. It's not perfect, and we're iterating. My reports are showing progress I'm very pleased with, especially moving issues from the New status forward (25% improvement weekly). All this results in the engineering team being better equipped to address issues and maximize their time. I believe we'll be seeing better fruits here in coming weeks and months.

We have several builds in the queue this week for updates to the pre-release regressions, as well as some individual web previews for performance and features. More to come.

Yes it is frustrating all these worries including performance with android, carouselview and more but I do not think either harass the team is beneficial. I think they are already putting pressure to themselves, especially if you want a quality result. I expect a lot like you from this update.

@RayTrask When Xamarin.Forms started, it featured Windows 8 Phone as a red-headed stepchild of a platform. UWP seems to be getting more support, but I wouldn't expect them to start targeting older, end-of-life platforms.

Can someone please tell me what FlexBox gives us that we cant get from XAML with maybe just a few additions? I am a WPF dev as well and there really wasn't any layout we couldn't achievement in XAML with some code-behind.

In the same way that the existing XAML layout system is powerful and productive for some, others find the way a FlexBox-like system flows and adapts makes more sense. You can review it on the dev branch now. We'll be putting out a preview package shortly and will encourage anyone interested to give it a look.

@JamesHancock.1360 while I am a big fan of the CSHTML5/JSIL team what you are suggesting would actually be counterproductive to and for .NET. CSHTML5 and JSIL do not offer the capability of PCL or shared code between server and client. While this does make all the code more ".NET", you ultimately still end up with two incompatible codebases between client and server, and are left with the management/maintenance pains as such.

Xamarin is really the best thing that has happened to .NET since Silverlight. They really know their stuff. I myself would prefer to see XF become more of a Noesis-based client model whereby you have the ultimate freedom to create your controls/UX the way you would like without being constrained by platform expectations/constraints. Also, having to create a custom renderer for each custom control for each and every platform seems like a significant hurdle and a lot unnecessary work, especially when such concern is easily handled by theming/templates. You know, much like how the web operates.

@DavidOrtinau it's now April, what is the status of perf improvements on Android? I haven't seen any new check-ins in the android fast renderer branch for the last 4 weeks. When can we finally see some perf gains?

I have asked (regarding the performance) in the pre6 thread (in the hope for a feedback from some developers): https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/87970/xamarin-forms-2-3-4-221-pre6#latest
Unfortunately - no feedback (I don't hope, this is bad sign...?)
I fully support the proposal of @rogihee:It really would be nice, if Xamarin would create a "performance benchmark app" (containing, specific pages with a lot of labels, a lot of images and a huge listview), would do tests with the benchmark app (at least with new "stable" versions) and let us know the results (startup time and specific pages)...
So we all could compare the platforms (iOS vs Android vs Windows) but especially the (hopefully) approved performance for each platform
This would especially make sense, as the performance further should be boosted for Android in the further releases this year.
2.3.4 is estimated for:

2.3.4 - Est Q1 2017

>
Q1 is over now... maybe an update of the roadmap would make sense...?
Thanks

Cold startup time and layout performance. Is there a reference test app such as the gallery app that could be used as benchmark?

Good timing to discuss this! We are in the process of building out a gallery of common UIs specifically for measuring and tracking performance.

Would anyone be open to contributing some of your common UI from existing apps?

While we have a list and our own apps to guide what we will include in the tests, it would be most helpful to have a good selection from others in the community. I'm not looking for "best practices" or cleaned up code, but rather just what you are using. And just the layout, so hopefully that's an easy request rather than providing full production apps.

If anyone would be up for that, I'll perhaps organize another thread to discuss how we do that. We'll also want to get our solution up on GitHub for everyone to contribute to. We have a foundation begun, but to make it easy for everyone to contribute UIs we need to do more and I think seeing some of the UIs we will be testing would be very helpful.

Re: fast renderers, we have been reviewing and testing them. They will soon be in the nightly builds (I believe there's a merge PR in the works or awaiting review) and then our next pre-release. We have also scheduled to work on the other renderers, and then iOS. The commits on that branch aren't the whole story.

We have had some design discussions the past few weeks about Android performance specifically and are exploring additional areas of improvement.